What Makes A Successful Safety And Health Program In 2021

The following is the transcript from an interview with Fred Rine, FDRsafety CEO.

I’m often asked, “what makes for a successful safety program?” And I’m going back through my career and is has to start at the top – in the board room and then from the CEO to the president, from executive management to frontline management, all the way down to the hourly employees. Because if you don’t have top commitment, it’s just lip service and the employees will figure it out.

At the same time, if you don’t get employee involvement then they’re not going to be part of the solution. I once had a boss tell me which I’ll never forget it and he said “what interests your boss fascinates you”. And you have to let that sink in or soak in and I thought about it. And he came back

Employees are smart. They know if they’re getting lip service.

In my early years in the steel industry I had numerous Plant Managers and we changed plant managers pretty frequently. And they all said that safety was a major issue with them but a lot of it was lip service. And you always have the saying “you fake it til you make it”.

You can’t fake Safety.

Your people will see right through you. So again the key is you can have all the involvement in the world at the bottom but if you don’t get it coming down and up, it’s got to be balanced and that’s what I have found through my career.

The ones, the CEOs are really committed to it. Not just verbally. I’ve never met a CEO that said “I’m not concerned about safety” but you’ve got to show me. What are you going to do about that?  I believe any meeting held the first topic should be Safety. Whether it’s a one minute conversation, a five minute conversation, because if you’re a leader and you start your executive meeting with safety, what message are you telling your coworkers?

It’s important to me, right?

If you look at a successful company, if you improve your safety performance,

what’s going to happen to quality? What’s going to happen to productivity?

What’s going to happen to profitability?

They all improve.

I’ll ask people to rank these categories from 1-4 on the level of importance: Safety, quality, productivity, profitability. That’s an interesting question to ask someone.

They’re going to say safety. That’s the pretty standard answer.

And I say, what if you’re great at safety but you’re losing money? Are you going to be in business? What if you’re great at safety but you’re quality is bad?

They’re like the four legs of a four legged stool. If you take one leg off a four legged stool, what’s going to happen to it? You’re going to fall. So we shouldn’t have safety competing against those other elements because a successful company, you have to hit all four categories. That’s the key.

CEOs are smart. They’re smart people. And us in the safety profession, we have to be able to think the way they think They’re also numbers people, a lot of them. And we just can’t throw numbers at them. I get frustrated when someone says “my senior manager doesn’t support me” That’s a very common statement from a safety person and I understand it because you have to be able to talk their lingo.

You have to be able to talk about what’s important to them. And once you get through to them. In my experience they’ve bought into it but we’ve just got to be able to communicate on their level.

FDRsafety helps organizations set this thought process up.

In fact when we go to a client, a good example, when we talk about safety awareness. The way we do it, we do a pilot and that is an abbreviated session and we set it up and do it for free, and why would you not do it for free? We won’t go do it unless you have senior leadership in there. Not just senior leadership, but hourly employees, salary employees, but I want that top person, as high as I can get, in that meeting because they are the ones who have to buy into it

And that’s been our strategy- to work with the senior leadership, hourly employees, and supervisors.

You’ve got to get complete buy-ins. It’s got to be seamless from the top all the way down to the bottom.

If you have questions or need help regarding anything safety related,  please reach out to FDRsafety.